Thursday, December 08, 2016

Housekeeping...

Doing a little straightening up around the house yesterday, I came across a balled-up plastic grocery sack that clanked when I picked it up. "Was ist los?" I wondered, and dumped it out to find a few Bodyguard 380 magazines and a complete BG380 top end with XS Big Dot sights that Marko had given me on one of my visits up there.

So, hey, here's a chance to put the gun together and see how it runs heads-up against the LCP II, heir apparent to the previous sales champ of this class of pistol. So I grabbed a box each of Armscor FMJ and Speer Gold Dots (courtesy of Lucky Gunner) and headed for the range.

When we left off the BG380 test at 1,335 rounds, it was having light strike issues. Since then, it had fired three magazines of the Armscor in an attempt to track down why that ammo was giving the P250 fits.

In firing 25 rounds of Armscor, the Bodyguard experienced four light strikes. All four popped with a second pull of the (true Double-Action Only) trigger. The 25 rounds of Gold Dots, with their softer CCI primers, went off without a hitch. Even after 1,405 rounds, the trigger pull remains too heavy for my RCBS fish scale to measure, since it only reads to eight pounds.

The Ruger's trigger, on the other hand, breaks at 4.5# now on the same scale. It fired all fifty rounds without any malfunctions of any kind to report.

The difference between the sights on the guns was night and day, pun only moderately intended. While I'm not a huge fan of the XS Big Dots, since there are much better high-visibility solutions on the market now, they were still perfectly adequate for dropping in solid hits at five yards. The sights on the Elsie Pea Too, while an improvement over the ones on the original, are still kinda small, and were lost against the all-black target in a black-on-black-on-black muddle.

For the LCP II, this makes 796 rounds fired since the gun was last
cleaned or lubricated with eight failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245, #600, #628, #630, #697, #704) and one failure to feed (#540). 1,204 rounds to go. .